[twelvechairs]

Thanks for the response. After your first sentence I was looking for something to disagree with. But actually I agree with you on pretty much every point you make here - I am just slightly unsure how this disagrees with what I said previously.

My guess (from your second last para. especially) is that you think I am advocating more 'dumbed down' high-level visual languages/ides/etc. which I really don't mean to - at least not like the ones of the past. To me these tend to really fail at what I want because they tend to: (1) have a very limited scope of functions (2) have pretty fixed interfaces which simplify certain tasks, but also make others much more complex than a simple command line or similar (3) not make it easy for you to transition to other environments [to learn something with different or lower-level functions].

To me, many of the subtleties of implementation (such as the points I just made above) often actually matter a lot more than the big words (like 'visual programming', 'IDE', 'UI' etc.) that are bandied about far more often.

I guess its my fault for trying to be terse. I think it is very difficult to discuss these things in message-board format because different words mean very different things to different people. In the end I think we are probably looking at the same goal from different directions.